After finishing college in the midst of a pandemic and working a variety of part-time and seasonal jobs over the course of the next year, I started to really get the sense that I wasn’t doing nearly enough to help the planet.
I reached out to my friend Charles, who sent me this link
He also invited me out to the Mojave Desert, where he was leading a watershed
reconstruction project on an oasal plot of land with a running well and a central drainage. I quit my job in Boston, and journeyed southwest, to camp out in the desert and help Charles and the owner of the land (a man called Jolly) with a number of simple tasks, including carving trails, planting plants, and building check dams
At first it was just three of us there, but more people began to arrive, each of them with a unique trove of knowledge and a deep passion for regeneration. There was talk about the small water cycle and how we can rebuild local watersheds to bring back California’s rain. There was talk of permaculture, of the integration of agriculture and ecology, of the soil-carbon sponge and the significant role that plants and biodiversity play in stabilizing earth’s climate. There was talk of sociocracy, and of organizing prosocial coalitions outside the boundaries of traditional statist politics. There was talk of alternative banking, and what the future of money might look like. I found myself swimming through a sea of book recommendations. I felt simultaneously woefully ignorant and deeply inspired.
Most of the people who gathered there in Acton had met each other through an internet community known as Earth Regenerators (linked above), which started as a book club for a work called The Design Pathway For Regenerating Earth, by Joe Brewer. Upon leaving the desert, I inhaled the book and joined the network, and was graciously welcomed by Joe and those surrounding him. I found that my broader feelings about being a human in our time were contextualized in a new light.
I have been struggling to make peace with the feeling that I’ve wasted too much time ignoring earth’s problems, instead engaging in meaningless and narrow-sighted activities inherited from a culture that is far too disconnected from humanity’s natural roots. Joe writes a lot about grief and trauma in relation to environmental catastrophe, and I found that some of my past mistakes make sense through the lens of grief for a dying world. It’s natural to make mistakes out of anger, to live for periods of time in distraction and denial, to justify contrived tasks by bending over backwards to connect them to distantly related problems, and to sometimes feel paralyzed by sadness. It can be excruciatingly difficult to accept reality.
In some sense, my time in the desert and my introduction to Earth Regenerators felt like a reset button. I came away feeling like I was starting over. I was no longer able to deny that I felt compelled to act on behalf of a sustainable future, and I was all-too aware that I knew almost nothing about what goes into regeneration at a hands-on level. I decided my next task was to learn all I could about permaculture. This blog is where I will share what I find, from the perspective of an absolute beginner.
After visiting my homeland in the Sierra Foothills, I found my way back down to Southern California, to the quiet hills of Valley Center. Here I was to spend some time on an organic farm called Chandelier Springs that I’d found through WWOOF, learning about permaculture and soil composition from a family with deep roots in the area. They ran an off-grid homestead of sorts, sustained on well water and solar power, with many growing experiments. The owner, a man named Doug, also owns a small-scale soil company, and possesses a tremendous amount of knowledge pertaining to soil and fertilizer.
Doug was excited to share his knowledge with me. He said it had taken years to craft the ideal organic fertilizer, but he had boiled it down to three important components:
NPK, humic acid, and chelation.
Anyone who has bought fertilizer is familiar with the three numbers on the label representing the respective percentages of Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium in the mix. These three macronutrients each have an important role to play in plant health, but according to Doug it’s not always the case that more is better. Different plants will have different nutrient needs, and different fertilizers will offer different ratios. A lack of nutrients can starve and kill a plant, but over-fertilizing can cause its own set of problems, analogous to the diseases a human might get from habitually overeating. Good soil must have a reasonable balance of NPK. Doug was a big fan of fish meal, which has an NPK of 6-10-2. He particularly liked to use it for citrus trees, since they’re pretty robust and fish meal is too potent for certain plants.
I had never heard of humic acid before, but according to Doug, it is quite powerful in bolstering soil integrity and helping plants derive nutrients. His favorite method of attaining it is through earthworm farming. He made his humic acid using a worm farm, wherein worms would feast on decomposing organic matter and secrete a “tea” that he would mix in with his fertilizer. There’s a paper that goes into more detail by Atiya et. al. cited below (1).
A chelating agent is used to protect the plant from potentially harmful metals. I asked my chemistry team* to explain chelation to me, and they said it was “pretty much like entrapping a toxic metal substance in a cage of claws so that the plant is protected when it absorbs it. More can be read about chelation here.
In terms of soil composition, Doug really liked having pieces of coconut shell in there. He said that in addition to providing some essential nutrients, the shards of shell serve as ramps that slow the passage of water. I had never thought about this before, or the fact that gardeners use pumice or perlite to increase water retention. I remember getting in trouble as a kid for pinching perlite chunks to dust in nurseries, but I never stopped to think about what the perlite was doing in there in the first place. Cool stuff!
Not far from Chandelier Springs, there is a quaint establishment called the Yellow Deli, owned and operated by the residents of the neighboring Morningstar Farms. They are a chapter of the globally recognized cult known as The Twelve Tribes of Israel.
Myself and another WWOOFer were invited to one of Morningstar’s weekly celebrations, so of course I had to go check it out. We strode up a long walkway adorned with grapefruit and palm trees, and arrived at a shaded pavilion where fifty or so chairs were arranged in a circle. The men all bore beards and wore plaid shirts and jeans. The women were clad in purple headpieces and dresses. Most of the people wore diadems. They all had Hebrew names, like Adasha, Yavala, and Yashar.
Immediately upon arrival we were offered tea, and everyone was very eager to get to know us. I got the sense that their community was rather insulated. I saw no electronic technology beyond lighting supplied by solar panels and a tuner on Yashar’s guitar.
Their ritual began. They joined hands and began dancing in a circle. They sang joyous songs and grinned gleeful grins as they pranced and clapped and spun. Their mirth was infectious, but I couldn’t help noticing that not everyone was partaking in the merriment. Several of the men hung back in the shadows, looking weary and resigned.
The people sang of joining together and following their savior into the next age. They sang of starry crowns and a future beyond imagination. They sang of birds and trees, of harmony with nature. They sang of the evil one, and of judgment day. Their musicianship was remarkable, and I smiled at the sight of young children joining in with instruments of their own.
When the ritual ended, we were invited into their hall for dinner. There, we were granted a feast of fresh produce that they had grown, and meat that they had raised and slaughtered. I was impressed by their self-sufficiency and their communal mentality. The food was delicious.
After dinner, we jammed.
I had seen guitars on their pamphlet, so I’d brought my mandolin. That ended up being a great decision. They had guitars and fiddles and a bass and even an accordion, and they could play the shit out of it all. We taught each other some songs, then I bid them goodnight and went back to Chandelier.
I would never dare join the cult, because they have a lot of really specific lore that doesn’t make sense to me, and to join requires sacrificing a great deal of freedom, but even still, there is a lot that many of us outside could learn from their connectedness to land and community. The Twelve Tribes are invested in regeneration, and despite political barriers between me and them, that is meaningful.
- ATIYEH, R., LEE, S., EDWARDS, C., ARANCON, N., & METZGER, J. (2002). The influence of humic acids derived from earthworm-processed organic wastes on plant growth. Bioresource Technology, 84(1), 7–14. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0960-8524(02)00017-2